[HN Gopher] Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, file...
___________________________________________________________________
Italy's Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq
IPO
Author : mmarian
Score : 117 points
Date : 2026-06-08 15:04 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| lhoff wrote:
| They also own Komoot and I am anxiously awaiting the
| enshittification.
|
| As of now my use cases still work and it certainly helped that I
| bought the lifetime all-world map package.
| w4der wrote:
| It has already started, many features which you could
| previously access without an account are now locked behind a
| login screen.
| elffjs wrote:
| Per Wikipedia, Bending Spoons owns: AOL, Brightcove, Eventbrite,
| Evernote, Harvest, Issuu, Komoot, Meetup, MileIQ, Remini,
| StreamYard, Tractive, Vimeo, and WeTransfer.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons
| postalcoder wrote:
| You missed filmic. Wow. So these people are the reason why
| Filmic went overnight from one of my favorite iOS apps to
| something for the trash heap.
|
| my knee jerk reaction is to throw shade at the ppl operating
| the company but, upon second thought, there's an obvious
| pattern of them relieving the company from people who knew less
| how to run (and sustain) it. I haven't used evernote in almost
| a decade but it actually seems.. fine? I stopped using it when
| the company started selling merch as a latch ditch effort to
| make money.
| fckgw wrote:
| They're basically the retirement home for once-good apps and
| services who still serve a dwindling core audience but are
| not longer growing or even a real contender in their field.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| At least Evernote was saved by Bending Spoons. At one point,
| even Evernote was getting roughly a third of its monthly
| revenue from merchandise, which is pretty wild for a
| paperless note-taking app and a decent sign that the core
| business was already in bad shape. For the rest, though, they
| seem very good at squeezing hard whatever is left.
| drob518 wrote:
| Yep, but now they're jacking the pricing to the moon and
| everyone is starting to leave for other apps. I almost did
| it this year and probably will do it next year.
| jonfromsf wrote:
| I left last month. $250 a year or something crazy like
| that. Obsidian has a free web clipper, I'm planning on
| using that since I was just bookmarking stuff.
| righthand wrote:
| Interesting, Vimeo sat under IAC for almost 20 years claiming it
| would go public, when it finally did it was eventually sold off
| to Bending Spoons not even 5 years in.
| michelb wrote:
| While I'm not a huge fan of the Bending Spoons model, Vimeo
| sure got improved quickly.
| muglug wrote:
| What exactly? From what I've heard, most of what was released
| in the months after the acquisition were features that were
| already in development/behind feature flags.
| xnx wrote:
| But how will they make it about AI...?
| raphman wrote:
| Hmm, assuming that the AI bubble might pop a little bit after
| the upcoming IPOs, maybe it's better not to call yourself an AI
| company then?
| joxdosba wrote:
| That seems like a very odd assumption to make.
| raphman wrote:
| > _" Founded in 2013, Bending Spoons reported a net income of
| $27.5 million on revenue of $601 million for the three months
| ended March 31, compared to a net loss of $112.2 million on
| revenue of $259 million a year earlier. A large chunk of its
| revenue comes from recurring subscriptions, providing a more
| predictable stream of income."_
|
| Gergely Orosz did an interview with them in 2024:
|
| https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/twisting-the-rule...
| stefan_ wrote:
| Clever, shitty numbers and they decide to IPO at the peak of
| the "actually SaaS is worthless" hype. I wish them the worst,
| considering their business model.
| gekoxyz wrote:
| In Italy they are really frowned upon by developers. They add
| 0 value. And it's not like "Oh, VC firms add 0 value to
| companies they acquire", this is really messed up.
| csomar wrote:
| So roughly $100m/year profit(edit). They are looking for a 20Bn
| valuation but interest rates are at 5%? How does any of this
| make any sense? That or we are in a real bubble.
| postalcoder wrote:
| You're mixing up the numbers. Their annual run rate is $2.4
| billion. Revenue grew 140% YoY. That's an 8x sales multiple
| on good growth. The valuation is not egregious.
| csomar wrote:
| Sorry I meant profit. On a 5% interest, you get 1bn (pure
| profit with no risks) per year for a 20bn of capital. Their
| revenue grew 140% YoY but does that account for new
| acquisitions? Also, their profit needs to grow x10 in order
| to match bonds. It may have made sense in a 0% interest
| rate world but not at 5.
| Zigurd wrote:
| It's a business model that's like a shark: perpetually
| swimming and eating or it's dying. That's how they can
| show big increases in revenue, but the profits are always
| decaying along with the products.
| moralestapia wrote:
| It's still a big mystery to me how they were able to pull
| billion-dollar acquisitions while being one or two orders of
| magnitude lower in revenue.
|
| >inb4 leverage
|
| Yeah, I know leverage exists but still, you cannot go to a bank
| and ask them to help you acquire something 100x worth your cap.
| adw wrote:
| Leverage. They're essentially an 80s style junk bond LBO house.
| foresterre wrote:
| Their strategy always was "buy company" and "instantly lay off
| about everyone" to save costs and rapidly increase subscription
| pricing (1).
|
| So far they've been relatively soft (for their doing) on Komoot,
| which I too am most anxious off.
|
| Bikepacking.com has a good read about Komoot; it was probably
| unsustainable in the long run before bending spoons took over
| anyways (2), yet I much rather had they stayed a sort of indie
| company driven by their passion. I will cancel my long standing
| Komoot subscription the day enshittification news breaks.
|
| (1) https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/03/komoot-acquired-
| history-... (2) https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-
| komooted/
| threetonesun wrote:
| You can imagine all of these moderately successful SAAS
| companies that see peak subscribers starting to fall off on top
| of legacy tech stacks and no will to make drastic steps to get
| back to growth and understand why they sell. I've never seen BS
| as specifically ruining companies (although they've certainly
| been known to jack up prices for the remaining subscribers) but
| it's not a good sign when they do buy something you use.
| Zigurd wrote:
| What would you rather have? A five-year struggle to turn
| around a stagnant SaaS, or a big fat check? It's a simple and
| effective model. First one out gets the biggest check.
| k310 wrote:
| IMO, they buy companies, lay off en masse and sell the now
| sunsetted products.
|
| Reminiscent of "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap, but he gutted and then
| flipped whole companies.
|
| I think of them as the bakery outlet store that sells only stale
| goods.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's the circle of life - all businesses reach a point where
| they don't have significant growth potential or became a "keep
| the lights on" operation, and at that point their investors and
| founders wish to exit and cash out in order to invest in
| greener pastures.
|
| That's where businesses like Bending Spoons, Red Ventures, and
| IAC come in for digital media.
| w4der wrote:
| They also have a very intense workplace culture, I had a
| manager who was part of Evernote while their site was being
| laid off by Bending Spoons, and he heard some wild stories,
| they pay above average for a European tech company (but with
| geo-fenced brackets), crunch a ton and then crash out at a big
| new year's party were they fly all their teams to some resort,
| among other things.
| orsorna wrote:
| Wow sounds very family friendly!
| cucumber3732842 wrote:
| So?
|
| Doesn't sound any worse than the average restaurant.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| How many people work in your family? How many different
| events in random parts of the world can your family
| attend together at mid-night December 31st?
| ElProlactin wrote:
| New Year's party with your coworkers at a resort sounds like
| hell. Or a script for a Jonah Hill movie.
| konfusinomicon wrote:
| I guess somebody out there has gotta make the croutons
| frevib wrote:
| This guy dubbed it "get Komooted", as they pulled the same
| trick for used-to-be-great cycling app Komoot:
| https://bikepacking.com/plog/when-we-get-komooted/
|
| The app quality almost immediately went down the drain after
| the acquisition by Bending Spoons.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| With LLMs, I feel like they'll have the last laugh.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| I don't like PE players like Bending Spoons, but I have used
| Komoot extensively for years, for cycling (and more recently
| hiking), and haven't seen any decrease in quality since the
| acquisition.
| epolanski wrote:
| Warren Buffett used to do the same for decades, in fact this is
| how he came to control Berkshire Hathaway which he calls his
| worst investment, as it wasn't rational and merely driven by
| ego.
|
| He wanted to take a controlling share of the company and then
| sell it for pieces so he started to buy increasing stakes in
| it.
|
| When Berkshire management understood Buffett's plan they
| decided to stop him to not let him cannibalize and kill the
| company, and they offered to buy back his shares for 11$ a
| share which he accepted as it would've been a 2x return on his
| investment in a very short time span.
|
| But then they made the critical mistake of low balling him by
| 1$ per share when it came to sign the documents, and he got so
| much emotional that he went and bought the entire company to
| prove a point and fire the management.
|
| It was not a good idea and he would not make money on that
| acquisition, so after selling off the assets he decided to make
| it the holding for its other investments.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Buffett wasn't liquidating textile mills. What would happen
| is that all the publicly traded New England textile companies
| themselves would close down unprofitable mill locations to
| stay alive and would use the resulting cash from liquidating
| the real estate to do a tender offer. Buffett simply bought
| the shares and waited for the next tender offer to happen.
|
| When Buffett eventually did take control of the Berkshire, he
| poured tons of money into it to try to keep it alive, and
| eventually lost every dollar he invested. He didn't make the
| decision to shut down the last mill until 1985! That was 20
| years after taking control. Throwing all that good money
| after bad to try keeping it afloat is why he called it a
| 'monumentally stupid decision'.
| flaviolivolsi wrote:
| Yep. They fucked up Komoot so badly that I'm building my own
| cycling app
| bayindirh wrote:
| They didn't burn Evernote to the ground to my surprise, but I
| jumped ship the day they bought it.
|
| It turned out that I have grown out of Evernote anyway, so no
| big loss.
| criddell wrote:
| I really liked Evernote but they raised the price too much
| for me.
|
| I used it mostly as an archive for long term storage where I
| could find things easily and it was pleasant to use. When it
| was $36 / year it made sense for me. I probably only used it
| a dozen or two times every year so it cost me roughly $1 /
| session.
|
| Then they quadrupled the price for me and paying $4 to dig
| out my TSA known traveler number was too much. I loaded it
| all into another application (Obsidian which is going
| downhill as well).
| kepano wrote:
| In what way is Obsidian going downhill?
| martin_drapeau wrote:
| 20VC had an interview with them:
| https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/luca-ferrari
|
| I came in thinking they would be like PE and just put products on
| life support sucking all the recurring they can. But it seems
| they care and improve the products. I think that has merrit.
| baobabKoodaa wrote:
| So first they fire all the staff and then they "care and
| improve the products"? Who? Who does that? They fired the
| staff, so who improves the product?
| kryptiskt wrote:
| They fire everybody and then they bring in way cheaper
| European developers.
| greggoB wrote:
| Especially Swiss developers, best bang-for-buck on the
| continent ;)
| mmarian wrote:
| I'm often thinking about building a better Meetup, it's so
| expensive for organizers these days. But then I acknowledge the
| network effects and I give up. And they own Eventbrite too! Savvy
| people.
| baron816 wrote:
| Isn't this just Luma?
| mmarian wrote:
| See reply I just made in other thread.
| burkaman wrote:
| I see a lot of people using https://luma.com/. I'm sure it's
| not as big as Meetup but it does have a decent community of
| users, and you can set up pretty much anything with their free
| plan.
| alephnerd wrote:
| At least in the Bay, Luma and Partiful are much bigger than
| Meetup now.
| mmarian wrote:
| Interesting. Luma is getting traction in London. Not so
| much outside.
| alephnerd wrote:
| It's about the user bases - Luma and Partiful are almost
| entirely professionals in careers like Tech, Finance, or
| Entertainment (especially LA), and the events almost
| always vet before accepting people.
|
| This helps ensure a better noise to signal ratio that
| Meetup simply couldn't provide.
| mmarian wrote:
| Interesting point, but I personally didn't find Meetup
| had a noise issue. You could filter for the right stuff,
| pretty easily. Also I don't see how Luma/Partiful will
| avoid this problem eventually.
| mmarian wrote:
| Luma doesn't do discoverability well unfortunately. Also very
| tech centric.
| burkaman wrote:
| I think it depends where you are. SF is all tech stuff but
| https://luma.com/chicago for example is mostly non-tech.
| mmarian wrote:
| Oh, didn't know that. My perspective is from the UK.
| baggachipz wrote:
| I had a good giggle when I opened their homepage and it looks
| exactly like the Performative-UI library[1] currently in the
| #1 spot.
| burkaman wrote:
| True, I think they were early to the trend though, it's
| looked like that basically since they launched:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210821023119/https://lu.ma/
| gulugawa wrote:
| I've looked at Luma and have mixed thoughts. The UI is a
| massive improvement over Meetup. However, it seems to be
| following the standard VC funded business model of attracting
| users and pushing excessive monetization once users are
| dependent.
| bsimpson wrote:
| Partiful feels like it has replaced Facebook Events, Meetup,
| and the other formerly-popular hubs for in-person event
| planning.
| mmarian wrote:
| Hmm, didn't know of Partiful. Quick look at landing page,
| seems more geared to parties and more social media-y?
| Meetup's event listing was good as it was; well, before they
| started charging for you to even see who's attending.
| bsimpson wrote:
| In NY + SF, it's used for anything you might want to attend
| that would be organized by an individual - parties,
| meetups, food crawls, classes, concerts, local events, etc.
| mmarian wrote:
| Interesting, learned something new, thanks!
| gulugawa wrote:
| I think we should try to build local hobby-specific websites
| and then have aggregator sites for event discovery.
|
| I made one for in person board game events in the Washington DC
| area at https://dmvboardgames.com/
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some history from only the past year in discussions:
|
| _Bending Spoons acquires Vimeo for $1.38B_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45197302
|
| _AOL to be sold to Bending Spoons for $1.5B_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45749161
|
| _Bending Spoons Acquires Eventbrite_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46124673
|
| _Tell HN: Bending Spoons laid off almost everybody at Vimeo
| yesterday_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46707699
| kome wrote:
| IPOing just before an evident .com tech bubble is about to
| explode is courageous. Good luck to everyone.
|
| That said, their business model seems fairly solid, and despite
| the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of their
| acquisitions. So there might be some real value in what they do.
| Yet, the expected market valuation is way off. But worry not:
| market will fix that.
| greggoB wrote:
| > despite the naysayers, they improve things a bit on most of
| their acquisitions
|
| There seem to be quite a few commenters stating the exact
| opposite, with concrete examples in hand (especially for
| Komoot). Do you have experience with any of the services
| they've bought, and can say how they've been improved?
| fhdkweig wrote:
| Not the OP, but from a stock market perspective, improvement
| can mean "lay off workers, and raise subscription prices".
| Not good for the users, but good for the kinds of people who
| like reading news about IPOs.
| greggoB wrote:
| Fair enough, though I do bristle at the use of the term
| "real value", like somehow it's a general net positive.
| They should at least qualify with "for shareholders" so we
| can know that their interests are specifically directed at
| financial enrichment
| riffraff wrote:
| why is it courageous?
|
| It seems the perfect time to do it while the market is still
| bubbly.
| Zigurd wrote:
| I'm old enough to have been acquired by Computer Associates at a
| company that acquired my company. CA's business model was to buy
| companies and then fold their products into an omnibus license,
| all of their customers, including the ones they just acquired,
| becoming involuntary licensees whatever the cat dragged in this
| quarter.
|
| It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch
| vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company
| with this business model.
| Maxious wrote:
| The number of corporate IT departments got caught when VMWare
| licencing shifted from Dell EMC to Broadcom
| https://www.techradar.com/pro/broadcom-has-allegedly-hiked-v...
| Zigurd wrote:
| For context, Broadcom bought CA.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| This still confuses me. It's clear they wanted to 10x
| licensing costs and /10 customers which assumably raises
| margins, but i still dont see it working out.
|
| My international enterprise and all our business partners
| moved every broadcom product we have to a competitor. On top
| of that, they were very aggressive and combative with their
| sales+cease and desist threats.
|
| They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about business
| relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone that will
| listen to me.
| nikanj wrote:
| That's what people have been saying about Oracle for
| decades, and they're still going strong
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > They earned enemies for life. Some of us care about
| business relationships. Broadcom is dead to me and anyone
| that will listen to me.
|
| That's the thing: Broadcom don't. Care, bother, whatever.
| You are not even a blip.
| burnte wrote:
| > It turns out a lot of corporate IT has no idea how to switch
| vendors in case a product they use gets acquired by a company
| with this business model.
|
| This always shocks me. I moved a company off of Salesforce in
| 45 days without a big issue. Day 1 was a bit slower but by day
| 2 folks were back at full speed. I've pulled off EMR
| migrations, ERP, accounting, etc. Moving is scary but doable.
|
| Sometimes the execs will just pay rather than risk anything. At
| my last job I spent 7 months researching and building a
| migration plan for an app that was literally costing us
| customers/patients because it was so bad. Came back with a plan
| to move to a better system (of of 38 I researched), 6 month
| implementation, $800k/yr savings directly, another $400k
| indirectly from other tools we could cancel because the new
| tool would do all of that. The board ignored me and the rest of
| the C-suite, and went back to the vendor and signed a new
| agreement that INCREASED the yearly bill from $1.2m to
| $1.8m/yr. They completely cut me out of all the negotiations, I
| didn't even know it was happening, and I was the CIO. I quit,
| and they're now being sold at a firesale price.
| fakedang wrote:
| Curious what did you move them into from SF? SF is usually
| treated as this infallible perfect piece of software by non-
| tech folks, especially those looking to pad their resumes.
| temp_praneshp wrote:
| Do _you_ know what three easy replacements are? If no, how
| do you know those people are looking to pad their resumes,
| did you figure that out from your non-SF conversations?
| burnte wrote:
| SF has worked very hard to cultivate that reputation, and
| at the end of the day they're mostly an overpriced
| application host. Once you communicate to the stakeholders
| that what they have in SF is just another application, and
| not actually "special", the conversations become a lot
| easier to have. They feel like Salesforce has them over a
| barrel at renewal time and helping them understand they CAN
| move makes a lot of conversations happen.
|
| The answer to what have I switched people to is at the end
| of this post.
|
| One company was using SF as a patient management system
| because their EMR wasn't set up right. They spent 6 figures
| a year on SF just to communicate with patients, make and
| change appointments, send and receive documents, record
| insurance information, etc. I spend 2 months fixing the EMR
| and they moved everyone to that, canceled, SF, and saved
| $200k/yr on SF and another $250k/yr on SF consultants. For
| a $50m/yr business, that's a lot.
|
| Another was using SF as a ticket system. Those folks we
| moved to FreshService. $180k down to $15k/yr. From my
| experience, ticket systems tend to be one of the most
| common existing applications that get duplicated inside SF.
| People think they have to build it in SF rather than just
| linking your apps. There was another company who kept SF
| for their CRM aspects but we moved them to an external
| ticket system that linked to SF and cut their SF bill from
| $550/yr to $270/yr.
|
| Then there have been cases where I'm brought in while in
| the middle of a development project. One of my favorites
| was this consulting firm said they could do all these
| things and integrate their EMR and Salesforce and that they
| had done it before with their custom middleware. But every
| month there'd be a new change-order from them where they
| said certain things weren't possible, and it came with an
| invoice! They were CHARGING this company to reduce the
| scope of an approved, signed, paid contract. I jumped in
| and said, "we're not paying any of these change orders, you
| don't get to charge us to do less work. You promised all
| these features, you said your software ALREADY DID them.
| What's the problem?" Then for two months we went round and
| round where I was able to offer them methods to do every
| single feature they said wasn't possible, and then they'd
| invent another reason they couldn't do it. I said we're
| done, canceling the contract, not paying any open invoices,
| not paying the remainder of the invoice, and in exchange I
| wouldn't recommend we sue them to get back everything we
| paid so far. Their own lawyer agreed, and we parted ways.
| They had us sign a Salesforce contract before we even paid
| them, so we were a year into a 3 years salesforce contract
| and literally nothing had been built out. By this time it
| turns out I had a reputation in the salesforce finance
| department, so it didn't take a lot of arguing to get them
| to offer a 50% reduction in exchange for paying off the
| contract immediately and canceling it.
|
| What they get moved to depends on what they actually need.
| 50% of the time it's not a CRM at all but a more
| appropriate app like an EMR, ticket system, ERP, scheduling
| apps, invocing solutions for existing accounting apps, etc.
|
| The rest of the time it'll be to CRMs and marketing tools
| that already exist, or custom extensions/connectors to
| their apps or a way to link their apps and a CRM. I've
| moved folks to Monday, Nutshell, Hubspot (who I don't like
| either but they're better than SF), a dozen others.
|
| I haven't dealt with a company yet that couldn't move to a
| cheaper alternative with no loss in functionality. If execs
| have emotional ties to SF then I can't do anything. I had
| one client, the sales VP shot down a conversion because he
| liked being able to say "we run on Salesforce!" Literally.
| he liked being able to brag they could afford Salesforce. I
| just left that one alone.
| fakedang wrote:
| > I had one client, the sales VP shot down a conversion
| because he liked being able to say "we run on
| Salesforce!" Literally. he liked being able to brag they
| could afford Salesforce. I just left that one alone.
|
| Unfortunately this is what I meant by the braggarts and
| resume padders. It's usually only after these people
| leave that the company takes a serious look at their
| books and then decide that they want to move away from
| SF.
|
| Salesforce is the most bloated piece of any software I've
| ever seen, and I've seen Azure. Apples and oranges, yes,
| but Azure is far more navigable than Salesforce.
|
| Once when planning to buy some property, I watched for 10
| minutes as the real estate sales agent painstakingly took
| about 10 minutes to navigate through and book an
| apartment for me. Enough time for me to start second-
| guessing about buying the property. Had SF been faster, I
| would've been stuck with some really illiquid shit.
| zeruch wrote:
| I worked at SugarCRM for years. It's often easier than one
| suspects once you figured out what a customer pain points
| are and show them a less burdensome solve. Most businesses
| do not need the kitchen sink approach of SFDC or SAP, they
| just have rarely had that demo'd to them.
| gedy wrote:
| Sometimes these deals are backroom friends/frat bros/sex etc
| and make no sense without knowing that crap.
| burnte wrote:
| Oh yes, I've had proposals rejected for terrible reasons.
| "I like bragging we can afford Salesforce." "We're special,
| other companies can't do what we do and other platforms
| can't do what Salesforce does." "I go back years with
| Salesbozo, he's giving us deals no one else gets, I trust
| him." (meanwhile they're paying 10% under list, not a good
| deal at all).
|
| One of my absolute favorites was, "well, our Salesforce
| consultant is the husband of the VP of marketing so we
| can't do anything that would eliminate his contract." In
| the end we got rid of Salesforce, him, AND the VP of
| marketing.
| gedy wrote:
| Yeah I hate the double standards here, if someone lower
| level recommends someone that they know or heaven forbid
| related to HR acts like they must quash this awful
| nepotism and scheming ha.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| HR works for leadership. Everything is consistent from
| that starting point.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| Why was the board involved in that decision to begin with?
| burnte wrote:
| That is both an excellent question and the root problem at
| that company. The PE firm was a majority shareholder, drive
| the board, and there were two board members who were
| HEAVILY involved in the company. Too heavily, they kept
| making decisions about them and not the company, and that's
| why I left. Several months later the PE firm was tired if
| waiting for results, fired those two board members and sold
| their share of the company at a big loss.
|
| I was really surprised, because one of the two I'd worked
| with at three other companies, all of which had successful
| exits (including an inpatient healthcare provider that we
| ran and sold during COVID!). Something changed, and at this
| company he made it all about him making the calls and not
| just trusting his CEO and company staff. He froze out the
| C-suite, manipulated facts to cause a change of leadership,
| and in 6 months he forced the new CEO to do all these dumb
| ideas we'd already tried repeatedly, taking the company
| from being break even and close to profit to a $2m/month
| revenue shortfall. There were structural process issues
| inside the company but he just kept insisting we needed a
| bigger marketing spend, "marketing can fix any problem."
| LearnYouALisp wrote:
| > The PE firm
|
| ah, can stop there
| greazy wrote:
| What is your ERM of choices? Opinion on EPIC?
| defmetrix wrote:
| Another IPO that I will be avoiding.
| easyThrowaway wrote:
| Mark my words: they will keep growing until they collapse, and
| once that happens, they will use their reach and contacts with
| the Italian government to ask to be bailed out out of debt. It's
| not a matter of "if", but "when".
|
| It's a well known strategy that has been applied by several
| Italian companies, FIAT (now Stellantis) first and foremost.
| gulugawa wrote:
| I looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they openly
| admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making an
| impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the sake
| of getting better ratings.
|
| Since Bending Spoons purchased Meetup, I have noticed the UI
| becoming more cluttered and hard to use. Also, I consistently get
| ads asking me to buy an organizer subscription to host events,
| even when on the page for a group I'm an organizer for.
|
| After seeing this emphasis on "impact" cause Meetup's UI to
| degrade, I'm skeptical about the company's long term future.
| toast0 wrote:
| > I looked at the Bending Spoons employee handbook, and they
| openly admit that employee performance is evaluated on "making
| an impact". To me, this means adding pointless features for the
| sake of getting better ratings.
|
| I worked at a company that was all about impact. Take the site
| down, that's a lot of impact ... If they wanted something else,
| they should have been more specific.
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